


The Thaw

by osprey_archer



Series: Bolsheviks [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Community: hc_bingo, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Loss, Memory Loss, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-08
Updated: 2016-07-08
Packaged: 2018-07-22 08:17:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7427119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/pseuds/osprey_archer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“The Winter Soldier’s been dead in the ground for ten years,” says Mikoyan, aghast,  “and you think you can dig him out and set him running again?” </i>
</p><p>When the Winter Soldier's former handler returns from the gulag, no one believes him when he says that the Soldier can be unfrozen - until he meets Zola.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Thaw

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to littlerhymes for betaing this!

“Comrade Zefirov! Welcome, welcome!” 

Mikoyan is coming around his desk, hands outstretched. He is stout, solid, prosperous, like a cartoon of the haute bourgeoisie; _all he needs is a top hat_ , Grisha thinks, and insane giggles crowd up in his throat. 

Grisha is very thin. Mikoyan’s firm grip hurts his fingers. 

“It’s good to see you, good to see you again,” Mikoyan says. He guides Grisha to sit. The window shows a view of the shining gold domes on the Kremlin. Two weeks ago Grisha was mining gold in the Kolyma, and now he’s in the Kremlin, and one of the most important members of the Politburo is saying, “Bring us tea, Marya Ivanovna. Comrade Zefirov, a cigarette?”

The cigarette is good, and the tea smells good, although Grisha will not try it till it cools. It is served in pretty china, with a plate of gingerbread cookies that Grisha does not touch. Mikoyan eats a cookie, then a second cookie, talking all the while of this and that, and the air is full of the smell of orange and ginger and cardamom and Mikoyan is saying, “Eat, eat.”

Grisha covers his mouth. The scurvy has loosened his teeth. He is afraid of losing one in a cookie. “My teeth…”

If Mikoyan feels even a flicker of embarrassment, he doesn’t show it. But he does look grave. “How many good and remarkable people we lost to the Purges,” he muses. “How many suffered because of Stalin’s paranoia.” Grisha twitches. Cigarette ash falls on his trousers. Mikoyan adds hurriedly, “Comrade Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s excesses at the most recent Party Congress. People speak of it quite openly now.” 

Grisha nods. His tea is no longer steaming. He tries a quick sip. It is not harsh at all, but soft on his tongue, smelling of citrus, sweet with a little honey. 

“...build socialism anew,” Mikoyan is saying. “The country is undergoing a thaw, comrade, we are melting out of the icy fear of Stalinism. Now that Stalin is gone, at last we can build socialism as Lenin wanted it to be. Happier times are upon us.” 

“Life has become happier, comrades. Life has become more joyful,” Grisha murmurs.

A small pained smile crosses Mikoyan’s face. He lights a cigarette with a little gold-plated lighter and sits back in his armchair, the cigarette wasting between his fingers. Spring sunlight shines on the Kremlin. “Are you settling in? Is there anything I can do for you?” Mikoyan asks. 

Grisha nods to the first, begins to shake his head at the second. But then he stops. “Yes, yes,” he says, his words stumbling over each other in unwonted urgency. All this talk of ice and thaw has reminded him of his Soldier, his Winter Soldier buried in the Siberian permafrost, waiting until Stalin is gone and it is safe for him again. 

It comes out garbled as he tries to explain to Mikoyan. Ten years in the camps have impoverished his tongue. Mikoyan listens carefully, leaning forward, hands loosely clasped and brows beetled as he tries to understand.

When he does understand he sits back sharply, aghast. “He’s been dead in the ground for ten years,” says Mikoyan, “and you think you can dig him out and set him running again?” 

Grisha is stunned silent. Of course the Soldier is dead. What did Grisha think would happen when he buried him in the ice? He thought he would thaw him out, did he, as they thawed the Soldier out after he froze to death that one night in the Alps? One night is not ten years. And probably the Soldier wasn’t frozen at all in the Alps; probably the medic just failed to find his pulse, doubtless he was alive the whole time. 

It’s crazy. It was always crazy. But Grisha is shattered. All this time he had hoped to one day dig the Soldier out and warm him back to life, but of course that is mad and his Soldier has been dead for ten years. 

“Don’t cry, don’t cry,” says Mikoyan, a hand on his shoulder. “It’s only natural that we should dream of bringing our dead back to life. I still dream of Sergo sometimes. We are walking the snowy walls of the Kremlin side by side, talking, but I can’t hear what he’s saying and he cannot hear me, and I think if I could only reach him - but then I wake up, and he is still dead. It’s been nearly twenty years since he shot himself.”

Grisha is nodding, still weeping, ashamed. Mikoyan hands him a dapper handkerchief - Mikoyan is always dapper - and Grisha dabs his face. 

“I’ve found you a job in the translation department,” Mikoyan adds. “Light work, just the sort of thing you could do in your sleep. Maybe even chances to travel abroad, how about that? Remember when we went to America together, my friend?” 

Grisha sniffs and nods again. He forgets to give the handkerchief back, and it is only the next day that he realizes he still has it. He keeps it. 

Grisha begins work in the translation department. He is better than the best security money could buy, because things slip out of his head as soon as he translates them. Sometimes they slip out of his head even as he translates, and he stares into space for minutes, hours maybe, who could say? He loses all track of time and comes back to himself with a jerk, then gazes with dismay at the half-translated German communique on the desk before him. 

But then none of this is urgent, the department is overstaffed, and no one else does much work either. They gather around the samovar and gossip. They ignore him, because he is a former zek and a non-person, and that suits him. All he wants is to be left alone. 

He is back in the same communal apartment where the Cheka arrested him a decade ago. It is all the same: the same people grown older and uglier, the same furniture more faded and worn out, Grisha's old dishes chipped and cracked. The Popovs expropriated them after Grisha’s arrest, and they have not taken good care of them. They took over his room, too. Their son lives there now with his wife. Their twin girls, eight year olds with untidy Pioneer scarves, are afraid of Grisha’s sunken face. 

Grisha sleeps, or does not sleep, on a folding cot in the communal living room. At first he lies awake all night waiting for the Cheka to come for him, and sleeps only when the dawn comes; but once he starts drinking he’s all right. 

When Marya Yevgenovna makes something he can eat, soft kasha or schi, he picks up one of his old bowls and holds it out to her, eyes steady on her face. She will not look at him, but she shares the food. The schi is helping his scurvy. His remaining teeth are not so loose in his gums anymore. 

He wonders sometimes about his other things - who took his books, if someone reads them now, or if they all went for lavatory paper. His old photos. His wedding picture with Yelizaveta, his album for Kolya’s childhood, the slender album of the Winter Soldier’s summer fighting in the Ukraine. That one is doubtless in some box in the basement of the Lubyanka, part of his case file. 

He remembers particularly a photo of the Soldier posing on an overgrown old Nazi tank, smiling, as pleased as if he’d brought down the tank himself. He hopes the Soldier didn’t wake up as he was freezing to death. He hopes he was asleep, and unafraid. 

***

Grisha has been on the staff of the translating facility for three months when he is summoned to Mikoyan’s office again. Mikoyan is all smiles, ordering tea and cookies. “You’re still too thin, comrade!” 

Grisha murmurs something. Mikoyan eats most of the cookies and does most of the talking.

At the end of the meeting, Mikoyan announces, “I’m sending you with the delegation to Vienna. A change of air will do you good.” 

Grisha attempts to demure, but Mikoyan swats aside his objections like flies. He doesn’t bother to answer them, just waves a hand as if knocking them out of the air, and Grisha is too tired to repeat himself. 

“It will be good for you,” Mikoyan says firmly. And that is that. 

He did no work all morning in dread of the meeting, and he does not work that afternoon either. But this time he is not staring into space at nothing. He is gazing out the window, at the June leaves on the trees – how can it be June already? In his mind, it has remained March since his return to Moscow. 

But it is June, and the trees are green, and he is thinking of Vienna. As a young man – a boy, really, before the war and the Revolution – he always wanted to see Vienna. Beautiful Vienna and the blue Danube. 

Perhaps Mikoyan is right. Perhaps a change of air will be good for him. 

***

Vienna is beautiful. Grisha likes the strong dark coffee and rich golden beer and the slippery noodle soups that he can eat without chewing. He finds that he likes simultaneous translation: it is as if someone else is speaking through his mouth, thinking through his brain, and that is a relief. It is difficult only when Howard Stark is speaking, because he speaks so quickly, technically, slangily. 

Grisha feels a brief moment of amazement that the Americans sent Stark to a chemical weapons conference, after what he did at Finow. But then that’s the world for you, and in the next moment he’s tired again, baffled by his own surprise. 

Near the end of the conference, the Austrians take them all to the opera, even the lowly translators. Grisha sits in the back of the box, mellow on all the beer he drank beforehand, sentimental at the ethereal sound of the orchestra tuning. His son Kolya used to play the violin, not as well as the Viennese opera of course, but pleasantly in the evening. How he loved music, Kolya; how he would have loved this opera, the shining lights, the glittering costumes, and most of all the music, if only he hadn’t died in Stalingrad…

Grisha drifts on these musings through the overture, an aria, a comical duet, and then the cymbals crash – and it is not the cymbal crash that causes it, but suddenly he is cold with memories and sweat. “Excuse me,” he murmurs, fumbling to his feet, leaving the box, down the grand staircase, out of the opera into the warm night, but he is still cold all over and shivering.

Kolya didn’t die at Stalingrad. That is the lie Grisha told the Soldier. He could not bear to say – he could not think how to explain – _my son died in the Purges_. 

The Soldier had looked ashamed of asking about Grisha’s children, even so. “Maybe I met your son,” the Soldier said. He thought he lost his arm at Stalingrad. So many of the men in Yegor Kirilovitch’s lab were injured there. 

“It’s very unlikely, Soldat,” Grisha said. “So many men died there.” 

“I know,” the Soldier said. He poked at the hard earth with a stick. “I wish I could remember.”

“Oh, Soldat. No. This is a blessing. There are so many things I wish I could forget…”

But it’s a lie, Grisha knows that now. A lie, because he is forgetting one of the things he never wanted to remember, and he would give anything in the world not to forget. He has reached a bridge now, and he does not think the river can be the Danube, because it is not blue but dark; and he stands at the apex of the bridge and gazes into the dark waters. He cannot see his son’s face, and the photos are all lost. They have all disappeared beneath the black earth as if they had never been. 

The dark waters ripple below the bridge. Grisha is so thin, he would sink like a stone if he threw himself in and went to join his dead. 

But if he drowns himself he won’t go to heaven, and then he will never see Kolya again, nor his Yelizaveta; although he is hardly going to get into heaven in any case, no matter how he dies, when he has so much blood on his hands; and in any case all of this is foolishness, the idle imaginings of the seminary boy he once was. There is no heaven, no hell, no afterlife, no God: the only hope of heaven is the future, and now he has reached the future and it is shit. 

His fingers tighten on the stone rail. He stands a long time in an agonizing stillness, hearing nothing but the river and his heartbeat, monstrously loud in the thin skin behind his ears. He cannot hear himself think. 

He stands, and stands, and stands. It seems like forever, but it cannot be too long. His heartbeat slows. A boat passes beneath the bridge, laughter, the tinkle of wine in glasses, the plash of an oar. Cars drive past behind him, tires humming on the road. 

Mikoyan, he thinks, would dream of offering him cookies, and Grisha in the dreams would never take them. 

His hands ache as he relaxes his grip on the rail. He turns away from the river. He walks, stooped and slow, back toward the glittering opera house.

He is nearing the opera house when he sees the man coming toward him: a member of the American delegation, a short squat Swiss scientist who complains sometimes about Grisha’s translations from the German. 

“Herr Zefirov?” the man says. Zola, that is his name. Like the French author. A pity that marvelous writer shares a name with this ugly baby in a bow tie. 

“Stepped out for air,” Grisha says, speaking German with his thickest Russian accent. He hopes it will annoy Zola into stepping onward.

But Zola stops. He is blocking Grisha’s way. “I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to speak to you.”

Grisha attempts to sidestep him. “I must rejoin my delegation – ”

Zola sidesteps too. “We have an acquaintance in common,” he pursues.

“Impossible,” Grisha says. 

“Improbable,” Zola agrees. “But true, I think. You know a Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes?” 

_Barnes, James B._ It’s engraved on Grisha’s eyes just as it was on the Soldier’s dog tags. He ripped them off the Soldier’s neck and threw them away into the snow.

Grisha has not told this to anyone, anyone. This is the kind of secret that got whole departments killed under Stalin. “I’m sorry,” he says, and he ought to lie, but he hears himself telling the truth instead. “He’s dead.” 

“Dead!”

Later, Grisha will be amazed that he mistook Zola’s disappointment for grief. But in that moment, Grisha’s eyes fill with tears at what he thinks is fellow-feeling. “I wanted to protect him,” he chokes. “I thought I was protecting him, but I killed him in the end. We kill everything we love, we Bolsheviks.” 

Zola clucks with distress. “I don’t suppose you could take me to his grave,” he says. “He is not in one of the mass graves, is he? That would be a great loss.” 

Grisha shakes his head. He is weeping too hard to speak. 

“We could learn a great deal from the body,” Zola says, and it sounds a sour note, but Grisha is too mired in his own thoughts to comprehend it. 

“I buried him,” Grisha gasps. “I must have been mad. I knew we would be arrested. He would never survive the gulag; he would starve in a week. I buried him in the tundra. He was frozen when we found him the first time, and I thought I could freeze him again, and wake him later…”

“Wunderbar!” Zola announces, and Grisha gazes at him, baffled, glazed with tears. “You thought right, Herr Zefirov! If he is frozen – yes – It should be possible to unfreeze him, maybe even to bring him back.” 

Grisha can barely speak. “Do you really think so?” he asks, gazing at Zola as pitifully as a child. 

“I’m sure of it,” Zola says. Grisha flings his arms around him. Zola attempts an an awkward pat on his back, and then removes himself from the embrace. “You get me to his body,” he instructs. “I can do the rest.”

**Author's Note:**

> The Politburo was the governing body of the Soviet Union, and Mikoyan was a real member. He served, to quote a Soviet phrase, “from Ilyich to Ilyich (Vladimir Ilyich Lenin to Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev) without heart attack or stroke!” – or, one might add, arrest. His relationship with Grisha here is based loosely on his patronage for Elena Bonner, the daughter of an old comrade who died in the Purges; after Stalin’s death, Mikoyan took her under his wing, despite her growing anti-Soviet activism. 
> 
> Grisha’s comment – “Life has become happier, comrades. Life has become more joyful” – is a quote from a speech that Stalin gave at the height of the Purges, when people were being arrested day and night. It sent off a surge of panicked gaiety throughout Soviet society. 
> 
> Mikoyan’s dream about Sergo is based on his actual final conversation with Sergo. Historians are divided about whether Sergo's death was suicide, or murder by the secret police dressed up to look like suicide; I lean toward the belief that Sergo did shoot himself. Stalin liked to torment his victims for years, criticizing their work, arresting people close to them (“How is it that you’re always surrounded by counterrevolutionaries, Comrade Sergo?”), cutting them off from their friends, before finally arresting them. He had barely gotten started with Sergo. Why cut the game short?


End file.
